There is a pattern to life in large corporations. It's not a pattern specific to a particular large corporation, but to all of them.

If you deal with them long enough, you get to recognize the language, the values, the legends, and the rituals.

You also get to recognize the types of people who work at these places and how they tick.

There are ad agencies that are specialists at this. They have learned how to talk the talk and walk the walk. They are very successful.

They may not be very good at creating ads, but they are brilliant at writing presentations that get MBAs to nod their heads.

Not So "Free" After All

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and editor in chief of Wired, has a new book called Free.

The point of the book seems to be, I don't know, some baloney about "we should not fear free." I've only read reviews of the book but the point seems to be that if you give away stuff for free, it will lead inexorably to money-making opportunities.

I'm not sure how, but I believe that this is related to the idiotic argument made by web maniacs that everyone is entitled to everything free on the web. Why should all intellectual property be free? Um ... because ... um ... "information wants to be free"... or some such childish nonsense.

Anyway, I'm not about to review a book I haven't read so you can discount everything I've said above. The real subject of this post is this: To prove his point, Anderson is giving his book away free. "I felt it was important to walk the walk," said Anderson.

Bullshit.

He's not giving away anything for free. If you want to read the book, you have to read it on line (you can't download it) and you only have a few days to do it before the hard copy of the book is released, then no more.

That's not called "free", that's called "sampling" and it's a marketing technique that's been around almost as long as authors working a PR hustle.

Read This Post

TAC has previously posted about the stupidity of marketers who have a knee-jerk reaction about targeting young people (see Aiming Low.)

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Marketers prefer clear answers that are wrong to vague answers that are right."

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"As an advertising medium, the web is like communism. It's never very good right now, but it's always going to be great some day."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"In the entire history of civilization, nothing good ever happened to a teenager after midnight."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."